Ekta Mehta, Author at CACI

Effectively planning and scheduling district nursing across the NHS

Posted on: 1 December 2022

Like so many industries and bodies, the NHS had to adapt in several ways during the Covid pandemic. The frontline of its efforts to tackle the virus made the headlines, but away from Covid wards there was a necessity for the NHS to adapt its processes and practices around the threat posed. One such example regards district nursing – how was the NHS able to effectively and efficiently plan and schedule its nursing workforce in the face of meeting the challenge of delivering vital services away from hospitals?

In short, there was something of a struggle across some NHS Trusts to meet this challenge. The usual routine of bringing vulnerable patients into the hospital environment for the administration of care had to be reviewed in order to reduce the risk of exposure to Covid for such patients. This meant putting more nurses out on the road to deliver care in residences and care homes. This change also fulfils part of the NHS’s Long Term Plan: “Over the next 10 years, health and care will change significantly. We have a roadmap in the NHS Long Term Plan which sets out a new service model for the 21st century: increasing care in the community; redesigning and reducing pressure on emergency hospital services; more personalised care; digitally enabled primary and outpatient care; and a focus on population health and reducing health inequalities.”

There was a sudden increase in demand for domestic patient visits thrust upon NHS Trusts with the Covid pandemic, meaning that processes and protocols had to be drawn up and adhered to in a short space of time. The process of planning and scheduling district nurses to carry out these additional tasks meant that a vast number of clinical hours had to be diverted to scheduling and planning. On top of that, there was the inevitable rescheduling of appointments to contend with, too.

This is a largely manual process at present for many NHS Trusts, with others relying on old software which isn’t suitable for handling the modern scheduling demands of district nursing. Operating hundreds of nurses to fulfil thousands of appointments in an efficient and effective manner is a huge undertaking. Doing this manually requires a monumental effort on the part of those responsible and using outdated software only makes the challenge harder.

Furthermore, each appointment must also take into consideration the skillset of the nurse conducting the appointment, ensuring that they are appropriately qualified to undertake the task. This requires careful planning and oversight and was a process that could be shattered in an instant with a positive Covid test for a district nurse. Operating this manually, simply put, is unsustainable given the hours being diverted to it, the strain of efficiently managing the workloads of every district nurse and the requirement to consider each nurse’s competency for each visit. So, there is an opportunity to implement new technological systems which will bring about lasting benefits – the healthcare world will be a different place even once Covid is a memory.

Automated planning and scheduling software can bring about a multitude of benefits for NHS district nursing including:

Reducing the clinical time spent on scheduling appointments – automating the process massively reduces the workload, leaving administrative time to focus on exceptions
Reducing travel time and expenditure – efficiently scheduling district nurses to maximise the number of appointments they can fulfil reduces the burden on the Trust by ensuring each nurse is fulfilling as many appointments as possible
Enabling demand and capacity modelling – identifying demand gaps and knowing exactly how many district nurses are required at any given time based on actual demand
Supporting the identification of skill gaps – spotting skill shortages based on future demand means a proactive and accurate approach to future workforce training and recruitment can be adopted
Meeting Lone Working Policy requirements – where staff are working alone there is the potential for them to face hostile situations; having a robust system in place enables them to raise an alarm where such scenarios arise
Increasing assurance that service delivery is meeting the requirements and needs of patient demand – reports can be generated to see the effectiveness of service delivery and to identify any shortfalls in staffing required to deliver services in line with patient demand
Reduction in missed or delayed visits (and associated clinical incidents) – by efficiently planning rosters, travel time allowances can be factored in, lowering the risk of external factors disrupting your schedule and making it more likely that appointments are met, reducing the risk of clinical incidents occurring as a result of staff scheduling
Improved communications with patients and carers regarding visits – automate messaging through your system to inform patients and guide nurses

All these benefits from a system can be used to shape a more consistent and reliable future for NHS Trusts in delivering vital services. CACI works across the UK with community care teams who use our Cygnum software to help deliver a huge range of centrally and domestically located services, helping to keep vital care and community services running. The software is also used by the Care Quality Commission to schedule their inspection workforce.

Cost of living crisis and vulnerable young people

Posted on: 29 November 2022

The cost of living crisis is impacting the vast majority of people in the UK. Inevitably, however, the worst effects will be experienced by the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. This has potentially dire consequences for children and their families who fall into that bracket. At the height of the Covid pandemic, Marcus Rashford was the public face of feeding hungry children; now reports are emerging about the children of families who don’t qualify for free school meals.

As everyday bills for basic items such as food and energy surge, it is forcing an increasing number of families into poverty. This has far reaching consequences for society. Domestic abuse is expected to rise, since it will become increasingly difficult for people to flee such situations and go it alone; instead they will be trapped in horrifying circumstances simply in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Where there are children involved in such family units, childhood trauma will increase, too. Who will be left to deal with this? Education, social and youth justice workers, many of whom themselves will be left in a precarious position by the cost of living crisis.

There have been several reports in the press about children going hungry at school. “Headteachers said that the group causing them “most alarm” are not children from the very poorest families, but the layer just above that who do not qualify for free school meals and risk going a whole day without food or with wholly inadequate lunches,” said one prominent report in The Evening Standard.

More families forced in poverty and the impact on children

There are practical concerns around the cost of living crisis for children in and around the poverty line. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are far more likely to come from low income households. Some 37.2% of children who have identified SEND qualify for free school meals. 19.7% of pupils without SEND qualify.

Taking this further, 56.2% of looked after children (LAC) have identified SEND. The most common type of need for LAC is ‘social, emotional and mental health.’

In 2021, the last time statistics were published by the government on the subject, 80,850 children were LAC in England. This number steadily increases year on year, so it’s reasonable to predict that the cost of living crisis, in placing greater pressure upon families to support their children, will force many past breaking point and result in more LAC.

On top of this, 400,000 children are in the social care system. Again, in a time of social strife, it’s not unreasonable to predict a rise in this number, too.

How can our services react?

The obvious fix is money. Sadly, that’s unlikely to be forthcoming. From Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget which did so much damage to the short term outlook of the UK economy, to current prime minister, Rishi Sunak exploring tax increases and public spending cuts, it’s clear that the government will be pursuing cuts in public spending in one form or another. A report from the Resolution Foundation economic think tank suggests that the government needs to find £40bn to rebalance the UK’s finances. Social care, youth justice and education will all be affected.

So, there won’t be any more money available to services that interact with vulnerable young people. As the report in The Evening Standard highlights, concern is now spreading away from those eligible for free school meals to those in the bracket just above them. To borrow another line from that report: “Up to 800,000 children in England live in households on universal credit that do not qualify for free school meals because their annual household earnings (excluding benefits) exceed £7,400, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. This risibly low threshold — of just £617 a month after tax — is applied by the Government irrespective of the number of children in the family and mostly impacts low-income working families.”

The social interpretation of ‘poverty’, as well as the literal one, requires redefining. That’s not something that can be achieved easily or quickly, so what can be done in the here and now?

Efficiency getting the most from available services

Efficiency is one way that services interacting with vulnerable children can, simply put, provide more services to more children. This will be vital in identifying and responding to children with SEND, as well as processing information on children such as their eligibility for free school meals and uniforms.

If staff are bogged down in administrative tasks, it impacts their ability to focus on improving outcomes for these children. What staff in children’s services are best at is helping those children achieve the best possible outcomes. If admin can be left to technology and automation, where possible, this helps to free up time.

In the case of vulnerable young people, those 400,000 in the social care system as well as those 1.49m pupils (16.5% of all pupils) with identified SEND, multiple agencies will be involved in their journey.

How can shared learnings be applied across agencies? Several expert opinions will be applied to each journey, so sharing this information across agencies will help in forming a stronger, better informed opinion of each child.

Conclusion

With inflation sky rocketing, energy bills soaring and wages failing to keep pace, there will obviously be a challenging time for many people. The links between poverty and SEND are clear, though.

So too, are the links between disadvantage and activities such as County Lines drug gangs. In desperate times, the apparent carrot of an easy way out will leave countless more young people vulnerable to these types of activity. It is estimated that as many as 50,000 young people are involved in County Lines activities across the UK. The temptation to make ‘easy money’ with such gangs will only grow with the cost of living crisis.

This is another situation where data and insight will be so important. There are various estimates as to the number of children missing education depending upon your definition of missing education, but those not accessing full time education is around the 50,000 mark. This might be coincidence, but such insight is valuable in protecting and safeguarding vulnerable young people.

As such threats increase in society, services being aware of them is a significant first step in attempting to resolve them.

The number of children in poverty will certainly increase. With that, crime will rise. Pressure on education, youth justice and social workers will increase, too. The link between poverty and SEND is apparent, creating another burden on already stretched resources.

Making the best use of the resources available is paramount. It has always been important, but never more so than now.

For more information on how technology can support local authorities, schools, parents, professionals and youth justice teams in improving outcomes for vulnerable young people, please visit our website here.

Why NHS costing systems can’t stand still

Posted on: 18 November 2022

The NHS landscape is constantly evolving – it’s the responsibility of trusted solution partners to keep pace with NHS organisations and contribute expert data knowledge to help them on their journey

Everyone’s talking about finance collaboration in the new Integrated Care System (ICS) structure, but it’s not easy for anyone to make headway in this unfamiliar landscape. It’s not as if the decks have been cleared to make time and space to understand and address the opportunity: NHS leaders and finance teams are still grappling with everyday pressures and priorities within their own Trust. ICS is another challenge to add, albeit one that offers excellent opportunities to improve patient care and experiences.

Up to now, costing data has been used by NHS Trusts for national cost collection (NCC) and internal service line reporting. Solutions like CACI’s Synergy 4 help Trusts to make this happen in the most efficient and integrated way possible and to gain greater value from their data for service design and improvement. But now, there’s a new challenge level. How can Trusts also share and embrace costing data from other Trusts within their ICS?

The rewards of understanding and analysing patient pathways across organisations

In principle, it’s clear that a holistic approach to analysing patient pathways – spanning acute, mental health, ambulance and social care organisations and community settings – has the power to greatly improve patient outcomes and experiences as well as delivering better value and efficiency to ease the burden on NHS care teams. But the practical processes and channels for sharing data and insight are far from clear.

CACI’s NHS engagement team has been working closely with our NHS clients to understand the complex considerations around sharing data between Trusts in a secure way that produces reliable and meaningful information that can help develop patient-centric services and make the most of NHS resources.

Trusts are engaging with a range of new data challenges for ICS

Information Governance (IG) for shared data is a key concern for NHS finance teams. Data must be anonymised, in order to protect patient confidentiality, but Trusts must be able to match patient identifiers to understand the end-to-end pathway through multiple touchpoints and organisations.

Finance teams are also keen to understand more about the quality of data that could be shared by other Trusts. Data formats may be an issue: there are multiple systems and data sources in use, even within individual Trusts, which can make it hard to match data and adopt a holistic approach. With clinical decisions and budget allocation potentially riding on the analysis, it’s critically important that pooled data is accurate, de-duplicated and in comparable formats, to avoid inaccuracies. Reporting on insight from shared data can produce unfamiliar results in the broader ICS context: for NHS leaders to trust the integrity of the data and analysis, these results need to be clearly presented and explained.

These are uncharted waters for NHS Trusts, for the new ICS organisations and for data solution partners like CACI. It’s not surprising that most efforts to launch costing data-sharing projects have so far been tentative. We’ve talked to finance managers who have shared data to explore the opportunity – generally they’ve done this in manual and fragmented ways, such as emailing manually created data files. This is clearly not a scalable approach for time-poor NHS finance teams, even if the attendant data protection and security issues could be resolved.

Operational finance teams can see the potential, but many are worried about IG, concerned about undermining their own Trust’s financial priorities within the ICS and don’t have the time or the mandate to focus on unpacking the issues. It’s already creating frustration. Some NHS leaders have a management accountancy background: they don’t yet have the data literacy training or experience to champion or direct a completely new costing data-sharing approach with confidence. This is a challenge we’ve also recognised: CACI’s Healthcare Insight Success Cycle (HISC) includes data literacy training modules which can help increase knowledge and confidence.

Collaboration with solution partners can enable ICS collaboration

How can NHS Trusts and ICS organisations break down these barriers and access the resources they need to unlock the potential of data-sharing? Partners like CACI can help to shoulder some of the load by ensuring that technology and data solutions are continually evolved and adapted to handle the emerging opportunities and challenges. Driven by the feedback and hands-on experience we gain from our NHS colleagues, we’re working on our Synergy proposition to develop the data-sharing, analytics and IG capabilities that will support the emerging ICS data-sharing requirement.

We know that ICS organisations are at different stages of their thinking about Trusts. They also have diverse levels of capability, resources and experience in producing Trust-level service insight from costing data. Everyone has a different starting point for their new ICS data-sharing journey.

How does your Trust’s approach and experience to date match up with our current understanding of the ICS landscape? At CACI, we’re highly aware that priorities, issues and opportunities are constantly evolving within the NHS. We’re rising to the challenge of delivering a costing proposition that’s built for the complex demands of today and tomorrow, supporting better outcomes for patients, better decision information for clinicians and better use of resources for the NHS. We want to support Trust finance and analytics teams by sharing our NHS data knowledge to help build data literacy among NHS leaders, so they can champion ICS from a position of understanding.

That’s why we are working alongside our NHS colleagues, engaging with their current challenges and offering data strategy, process and capability insight to help them move forward on the journey, as we evolve our Synergy proposition.

Please join the conversation through our user groups and round tables or get in touch directly to share your priorities and issues and pose any questions that we could help you answer through our NHS data experience and expertise. Contact consultant Susan Brooks in CACI’s NHS team.

Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council to support SEND services with IMPULSE Nexus

Posted on: 13 October 2022

Lucy Sweatman, Education Programme Manager for Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council said: “We’re looking forward to working with IMPULSE Nexus. Most importantly, the new system means we can increase the quality of the service we offer to children and families, enabling both authorities to improve their SEND processes, with input from all agencies into each child’s plans and provision. It will also make the whole process more efficient, bringing everything to do with SEND into a single view. This means we will be able to help children and young people with SEND in a more collaborative way, driving and enhancing the partnership working between schools, professionals, authorities and parents. This will make the process of recording outcomes and requirements much more straightforward, enabling us to act more swiftly and efficiently.”

IMPULSE Nexus is made up of several modules, of which local authorities can use as many as they need to support their education services. Based upon an interoperable framework, IMPULSE Nexus modules can integrate with other services and providers to offer a joined-up view of each child and service.

“We’re delighted that Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council have both chosen IMPULSE Nexus SEND solutions to support their ongoing work in this vital area,” says Phil Lucy, Director of CACI’s Children and Young Person’s division. “By providing a fully auditable trail of activities, with the ability for all stakeholders to record information, IMPULSE Nexus will help both authorities to enhance their SEND processes and provide efficient and effective support to those children needing their services.”

Nottingham City Council to use ChildView from CACI to support its youth justice work

Posted on: 5 October 2022

“We’re looking forward to getting started with ChildView and realising the benefits that it will bring for our service and the young people who we support,” says Simon Newling-Ward, service manager at Nottingham City Council Youth Justice Service. “We need a system that will support every aspect of our work. ChildView ticks this box and further enables us to share data seamlessly and fully with other youth justice teams. With young people often moving around, it is vital that we can receive accurate and complete data on them when they come under our auspices. At the same time, it’s equally important for us to be able to share the information that we have built on a young person’s journey if they move to another local authority, in order that they can continue to receive the best support possible.”

“We are delighted that Nottingham City Council has chosen to utilise ChildView across its youth justice service,” says Phil Lucy, director, CACI’s Children and Young Persons’ team. “Working with a majority of youth justice services operating in England and Wales and their major cities, I feel that our team can support Nottingham City Council’s team and we’re excited to do just that.”

The contract was awarded to CACI via the G Cloud framework.

How North Somerset Council has taken advantage of E Forms in ChildView

Posted on:

North Somerset Council has been using ChildView from CACI since 2013. As part of its drive to derive more benefit from the system, the council started using ChildView’s E Forms functionality in 2022. Designed to give ChildView customers more flexibility in creating, linking and designing reports, E Forms enables councils and those tasked with improving outcomes for vulnerable young people to gain more insight into their work. What works? What doesn’t? Building up a database around youth justice work enables councils like North Somerset to gain deeper insight and understanding of their work.

“We made the decision to purchase the E forms module following the recent demonstration of its functionality to us by CACI,” says Nicola O’Driscoll, principle business intelligence lead at North Somerset Council. “The additional functionality gives us the ability to create and add our own forms and assessments allowing North Somerset to report at a more granular level. As a result, this will aid effective targeting of resources, give greater management oversight, providing real depth and breadth of those risk and safeguarding factors that affect the children and young people we work with.”

Being more agile with the creation of forms and reporting enables youth justice workers to define the data that they need, not just work with pre-defined data capture fields. This helps teams to research into and report on areas of their work in a more flexible manner.

Getting started with ChildView’s E Forms module was easy for North Somerset.

“In terms of the training the group experience was very diverse, from being highly experienced with the application to being novices,” explains Nicola. “All participants were able to follow the training and the feedback I have been given was; “this was one of the best training sessions I have ever attended. The instructor was really clear and engaging and was able to answer every question. It was a really positive, inclusive experience. Following training there has been an incredibly high level of enthusiasm from everybody to get stuck in. Huge thanks to Carol, who was fantastic.”

The benefits of E Forms in ChildView

Create your own forms tailored to your bespoke process
Link forms together
Locally designed forms that can be reported on
Printable versions of each form

For more information on ChildView, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/childview/

Integrated care systems – is your Trust maximising opportunities?

Posted on: 21 September 2022

Since 2018, the NHS has seen Trusts building closer relationships with local councils and other important strategic partners such as the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.

The 2021 NHS Long Term Plan cemented an integrated care system (ICS) that would build on lessons learned and invest in keeping people healthy, while setting future social care priorities.

The introduction of ICS throughout the NHS, along with the government’s new Health and Care Bill, brings health care under one umbrella, and highlights the importance of data sharing to enable joined up support across the NHS, local councils, and other partners.

ICS is helping change attitudes to data sharing and how data can be used to improve service provision. This presents a huge opportunity for NHS organisations to improve services and accelerate elective care activity. It enables better use of data by consolidating, managing and sharing it more efficiently and easily, resulting in better care through more easily pinpointing where problems or hurdles exist.

While Trusts will have a wealth of organisation and patient data, bringing it together to produce meaningful insight that can drive decision making and improvements, and access additional funding, is crucial.

Joining up health services

The Health and Care Bill changes how the NHS is structured and puts ICS on a statutory footing, enabling partnerships that better join up health and care service, improve the community’s health, and reduce health inequalities. Benchmarking across Trusts becomes possible, enabling more effective and consistent patient outcomes.

Each ICS is led by an Integrated Care Board (ICB), which will have responsibility for NHS functions and budgets across the ICS. The system sees 42 new ICBs replace Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), with a change from 106 CCG geographic areas to 42 ICBs.

Currently, much of the work with data in the NHS focusses on delivering upon statutory requirements. But moving forward, data will also become a tool for planning and measuring, informing decision making for improvements to clinical practise and leveraging data to improve the cost of care and the patient experience.

Sharing information across Trusts enables benchmarking of services, while patient pathways remain the priority at all touchpoints. Technology can be used to leverage knowledge of the environment and constraints and provide a proactive view of activity. This will allow Trusts to have a much clearer view of the entire patient journey, and will be the start of the changing future of healthcare.

It will help ICS to look ahead at long-term population heath needs based on demographic data, and better understand future problems – enabling a next level of planning that may not previously have been considered.

The current state of integrated care systems

The NHS Confederation, which supports and speaks for the healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has carried out a review of ICS progress in 2021/22.

In the first of what will be annual reports into the evolution of ICS, it highlights what is working well and where it feels improvements are needed. These include:

ICS leaders may not have sufficient time and space to deliver the radical changes needed.
ICSs should make decisions at the most local level possible and be empowered to define what metrics they will be assessed on based on local priorities.
One of the biggest strengths of ICS so far has been improving joint working between partner organisations. Around 90% of system leaders believe they have been able to effectively improve joint working.
System leaders are committed to the principle of subsidiarity and 90% say this principle already applies to their system.
Another strength of ICS has been local workforces. ICS leaders feel they are making significant contributions to mitigate workforce pressures and improve working culture, with nearly 80% confident to deliver a ‘one workforce’ approach by July 2022.
More support is needed to help systems contribute to local social and economic development.
There is uncertainty about how the experiences and insights of leading primary care services at neighbourhood level inform system-level planning and strategy.
The biggest obstacle to further progress is national workforce shortages. The NHS Confederation is seeking amendments to the health and care bill to strengthen the duties of the Secretary of State for workforce planning, and has asked the government to develop and publish a health and care workforce strategy as a priority.

Taking the next steps forward

Data insight is crucial to help Trusts improve patient outcomes and drive cost savings. But finding the best approach to accessing the right funding and realising your digital strategy presents its own challenges.

CACI’s NHS services portfolio demonstrates our ability to support data projects at any stage of the data lifecycle, helping Trusts determine local priorities, accelerate timelines, maximise staff resources, improve joint working, and plan strategically for the future. And we combine all this with our wide experience of healthcare customers.

Data can become the building blocks of your solutions, showing you where services are at capacity, how to redesign them to avoid bottlenecks, and how to meet challenges and maximise opportunities.

Plan a call with one of our NHS experts today and take the first step towards optimising your organisation’s data provision.

Read our latest blog ‘Challenges facing NHS Trusts – and how to tackle them’.

And for more expert insight, download our essential whitepaper – Elective Care, how NHS changes are bringing opportunities for Trusts and patient care.

Challenges facing NHS Trusts – and how to tackle them

Posted on: 1 September 2022

Delivering better patient outcomes and value, while meeting targets and anticipating future needs, can be a challenge for NHS teams. There is constant pressure to do more with less, and with a high demand for service, quality is under intense scrutiny.

Even before the pandemic, waiting lists for elective treatment were growing. But by the end of 2021, 6.07 million patients were on waiting lists – the largest number since records began. As of September 2021, there were between 7.6 million and 9.1 million missing referrals of patients for elective care, and between 240,000 and 740,000 missing urgent referrals for suspected cancer.

“People will face serious health consequences as a result of delays in treatment, with some dying earlier than they otherwise would, and many living with pain or discomfort for longer than they otherwise would,” stated a March 2022 House of Commons report.

Tackling elective care challenges

The government expects the NHS to deliver around 30% more elective activity by 2024/25 than it was before the pandemic and has allocated £13.9bn in additional funding to tackle the elective backlog.

NHS Trusts are now exploring how they can access support to meet their targets, improve the patient experience and bring down waiting times. Digitisation is being seen by many as the silver bullet that will help solve their problems.

Over the past 20 years, elective care performance has been measured primarily through wait time targets, but changes to how the NHS monitors performance has seen the advent of new activity-based targets. The pandemic enabled a level of digital transformation that might otherwise have taken several years, and Trusts are looking to capitalise on this to deliver on these activity-based outcomes.

The Elective Care Recovery Fund is a £1bn pot of government money helping the NHS get back up to speed, and to aid different healthcare systems in working closer and more collaboratively.

Funding is awarded based on performance (i.e. increases in activity such as appointments or procedures). In order to utilise the funding, Trusts need to understand where there are opportunities to increase activity, make changes to create these increases, and be able to evidence them.

Data analytics can enable them to do this through forecasting, hypothesis testing and real-time analysis of wait times and patient journeys. Any activity above 95% of 2019/20 levels is reimbursed at 120% of tariff.

Digitisation of NHS services

Remote appointments are one key element of the patient journey where savings can be made. NHS England aims for up to a third of face-to-face outpatient appointments to be avoided by 2024 – saving £1.1bn and 30 million hospital visits.

In Norwich, a virtual ward launched in 2021 has saved nearly 2,000 bed days. The ‘ward’ enables patients to receive remote care from their own homes, with up to 20 patients a day being treated. Vitals such as temperature, blood pressure and oxygen are monitored via a strap around their arm and staff carry out virtual rounds through daily phone or video calls.

More than 80% of integrated care systems (ICS) now have a digitally-supported virtual ward, and these innovative forms of patient care are demonstrating how digital technology and data systems can enable Trusts to release capacity and deliver more efficient services.

Helping Trusts invest and utilise funding

Finding a different way through the pathways and exploring where the bottlenecks are and where there is capacity in the systems, is another crucial step forward, as is access to funding.

In April 2022, a new NHS payments system was introduced that enables an agreed local plan to be put in place between ICS members, targeting volume and case mix. A provider can earn a higher tariff for activity that exceeds the levels in the plan and for scoring highly on their CQUIN indicators.

Data insight is crucial to help NHS organisations plan, operate and continually optimise resources, services, and staffing – ensuring better theatre utilisation, staff rostering, waiting list reduction, capacity planning and operational management.

Advanced data analytics also enables NHS organisations to access the right available funding to help with a holistic recovery. Optimising data enables Trusts to explore opportunities, evidence these, and show changes being made – helping Trusts plug gaps and improve the patient outcome.

Next steps for Trusts

To meet the challenges currently facing the NHS, Trusts should be considering how to augment and optimise their data capabilities. A key step is to access and consolidate data from a variety of sources to inform deep and actionable insight about patients, services, and demand.

NHS Trusts will all be at different stages of their digital journey, but any additional funding they can optimise will be crucial. To do so they will need to understand where there are opportunities to increase activity, how to make changes to create these increases, and be able to evidence them.

CACI’s solution can help Trusts get the best outcome from the new NHS payment system and additional funding, and deliver the outcomes you need. We’re proud of our long-standing relationships with many NHS organisations across all care settings. We have hands-on experience of the pressures and opportunities facing your NHS organisation and the need for trustworthy information to support transformation and sustainability. Plan a call with one of our NHS experts today and take the first step towards optimising your organisation’s data provision. Visit our website.

And for more expert insight, download our most recent whitepaper – Elective Care, how NHS changes are bringing opportunities for Trusts and patient care.

The difference between reporting and insight

Posted on: 17 August 2022

Data is no use to NHS organisations without the expertise and tools to make it actionable

Data has become more and more significant in all industries and settings. The NHS is no exception. With a huge amount of patient, service and performance data at its disposal, there should be a wealth of insight available to help shape patient care and develop the best services in every community.

But there’s a very important caveat. Everyone knows that raw data doesn’t provide actionable information. That’s why it’s generally issued in the form of reports. But what do the reports tell you?

Reporting on data is not the same as generating meaningful and transformative insight from it.

It’s common for NHS organisations to produce reports that list statistics and objects without the context or perspective that could give them meaning as a basis for decisions. These reports can tell us what has happened and provide headline figures for costs, volumes and timeframes, but they don’t reveal insight.

Drawing insight from data means looking at it through a new lens. It could mean evaluating how past performance could influence future behaviours and decisions. It could mean modelling multiple hypothetical scenarios to decide the best approach from several options.

Data reporting is a valid exercise when you’re monitoring performance against fixed objectives. But it’s generally a historical, static activity. The data insight that NHS organisations need is about planning for the future and adjusting programmes in-flight to reflect the latest information and evolving patient needs. It’s about scenario modelling. It’s about bringing together different datasets, to gain more and more detailed and specific understanding of the causes of outcomes and what influences them. This kind of data insight is truly transformative because it allows NHS organisations to continually scrutinise, optimise and innovate in their services and care.

The impact of true insight on NHS services

Sarah Culkin, Interim Head of the Analytics Unit at NHSX, and Sukhmeet Panesar, Deputy Director within NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Data, Analysis and Intelligence Service describe the impact of data insight: “Knowledge is power. In healthcare, it is often life-saving. The NHS generates a huge amount of data which can be analysed and used to drive improvements in care and how services are run. Ultimately, data analysis results in improved patient outcomes and experience, as well as optimal use of NHS resources.”

Trusts and NHS service providers know that data is valuable. Many have already invested in data solutions and tools designed to store and analyse information. But not all are generating powerful and potentially life-saving insight. Digital insight for healthcare is a constantly evolving field, with new tools and technologies emerging to extract more relevant information. It can be hard to keep pace with the range of data resources on offer and to know how to prioritise system development and investment.

Acquiring and acting on insight demands data literacy in teams

Sarah Culkin and Sukhmeet Panesar highlight another key issue that affects many NHS organisations in their quest to use data to improve services: “In general, the NHS is failing to make the most of its data because there are not enough people with the right analytical skills to make sense of the information being collected.”

Data insight and analytics is a fast-evolving field. Without training, mentoring and support from specialists who understand the NHS environment as well as the potential of data, NHS managers and analysts cannot make informed decisions and harness the data they have to best effect. Education and skills are key – both for general data literacy in NHS clinical, management, operations and finance teams, and for analytics and technology in the data science teams who support them.

With all the data you collect, are you making the most of it to support crucial trust or service decisions and to deliver responsive, patient-centric care that meets real-time needs?

If you’d like to find out more about CACI’s Data Maturity Assessment service, or our data and analytics training, please get in touch. It’s all part of our HISC (Healthcare Insight Success Cycle) data optimisation approach for NHS organisations. Find out more by downloading our brochure Spearheading your data journey to improve patient outcomes.

Is knowledge and skills a barriers to transformative insight for your NHS organisation? Working with a specialist NHS data transformation partner could help you achieve best value from your data and budgets.

Find out how CACI’s healthcare team can provide advice on developing and maintaining your technology and offer staff training for data literacy and skills, so you can sustain your data journey from within. For further information, visit or website or get in touch with our NHS client team.

Managing patient data to guide you in the new ICS landscape

Posted on: 1 August 2022

How NHS organisations can prepare to access and contribute to a powerful pool of insight that will help them meet local needs better than ever before

When the new ICS framework rolls out, predicted for summer 2022, it should enable healthcare providers and bodies across the NHS to collaborate better than ever before, with a shared goal of providing improved patient care across the board. By moving away from fragmentation and competition, NHS services should be able to consider patient needs and pathways holistically and offer the best locally targeted overall care from a range of specialisms and organisations in a more coordinated and efficient way.

We have a real opportunity with the formation of the ICSs to change how we use data to better coordinate care and re-design our service based on the needs of our citizens… It’s a really exciting time to work in the NHS.
Ayub Bhayat, Director of insight and data platform at NHS England and NHS Improvement

NHS leaders and healthcare teams are excited about the opportunity to smash silos and break through frustrating organisational barriers to work more effectively together in this new, collaborative culture. But they’ll need the right information and tools for shared decision-making. That means bringing together data that was formerly held separately and unleashing its full potential as part of a comprehensive system of healthcare insight.

What should NHS organisations do to make sure they’re playing their part and will have access to the data and analytics they need to deliver excellent outcomes as part of their ICS?

Trusts and healthcare bodies will need to be certain they can share data securely and effectively. They’ll need systems that can bring together disparate data in actionable formats, so it can be compared and analysed at patient and pathway level. They’ll need reporting tools and dashboards that reveal insight to underpin operational and investment decisions, as well as to track the success of initiatives. They’ll need to continuously augment data, so planning and collaboration keep pace with real-time community and service needs.

Every ICS will have its own priorities, reflecting what the local community needs in terms of NHS care across the board. Different data and analysis will be needed to plan the best collaborative service provision in every area.

The overall vision is exciting, but to achieve it, organisations must identify practical steps to move from where they are today with their own data to the collaborative ICS data ecosystem. There’s an opportunity to exploit new and proven technology that manages and harnesses data to produce advanced, relevant and detailed insight.

We recommend a systematic approach to assessing where your organisation currently stands and how you can evolve your data strategy to achieve the best outcomes in an ICS. In CACI’s digital healthcare knowledge model HISC (Healthcare Insight Success Cycle), we’ve developed Discovery tools and processes that help NHS organisations do exactly that:

Describe and assess your current data strategy, systems and approach
Define your future data direction and destination as part of an ICS
Review your data security, storage and infrastructure
Build a strategy and roadmap for data insight that will improve clinical and operational delivery and performance in the ICS framework
Build a business case to connect investment in insight with tangible outcomes

CEO of NHS Confederation Matthew Taylor said in March 2022 that the use of high quality, real-time population health data will help “to shift from a system that responds to demand to a system that genuinely responds to need”, and that the NHS’ implementation of Integrated Care Systems (ICS) has the potential to “help create that enabling environment” needed to leverage data effectively.

Ruth Holland, deputy chief information officer at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, went even further: “ICS’ will stand and fall on their data capability in ten years’ time. I would sternly encourage digital and data leaders to look at the costings you are putting into plans [for staff and skills] that will support the ambition.”

CACI’s specialist healthcare technology team has the experience and knowledge to support your organisation with planning and delivering an ICS data transformation programme, including training and skills transfer for your staff.

If you’d like to find out more about CACI’s HISC model for optimising NHS healthcare data, download our brochure Spearheading your data journey to improve patient outcomes. It describes in more detail how you can take action to activate data insight to reshape health and social care in an ICS.

To find out more visit our website or speak to an NHS data consultant about the results we’ve helped other organisations achieve, please get in touch with our NHS client team.